Any Democrat Who Votes for Jeff Sessions Should Be Excommunicated from the Party

I agree with the headline of Jonathan Bernstein's column in Bloomberg today. I don't think Senator Professor Warren is "weak" for supporting the nomination of Ben Carson, a space alien, to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development. I just think she's mistaken because Carson has no more business running that agency than he does flying the space shuttle. But I can't go along with the general thrust of the piece, that a general opposition to the president*'s shoddy imitation of forming a government is wrongheaded because the Republicans will simply vote these people into the jobs anyway. From Bloomberg:

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The reality is quite simple: The 48 Democratic senators cannot defeat Trump's cabinet picks. It takes a majority to do that, and so far at least Republicans appear ready to support whoever Trump picks. In all cases in which they do, Democrats aren't choosing between confirming and not confirming.

This, I would point out, is an argument that only Democrats ever have. Republicans don't have this sort of philosophical crisis. (Look how quickly people like Young Marco Rubio folded on Rex Tillerson.) Even Bernstein's basic formulation agrees that Republican support for even the most egregious nominees will be automatic and unanimous.

In the face of that, why shouldn't Democrats simply vote against these people? How will that make anything worse?

The former seems to be the case for liberals such as Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown, who are voting for secretary of Housing and Urban Development nominee Ben Carson. Indeed, Warren has explained that "in his written responses to me, he made good, detailed promises, on everything from protecting anti-homelessness programs to enforcing fair housing laws." If Democrats were simply knee-jerk opponents of all of Trump's nominees, Carson would have had no incentive to give Democrats any commitments at all. Of course (as Warren acknowledges) such promises aren't fully binding. But even if Carson only keeps some of his commitments, Democrats will have gained far more than an automatic symbolic "no" vote.

Nevertheless, it's a legitimate debate to have, even though it's the kind of debate that happens only among Democrats and liberals. Personally, I'd vote (maybe) for Mattis and (maybe) for Zinke, but I would vote against every other one of these nominees because I still haven't seen a good reason not to do so. I will concede that opinions may differ.

There is only one exception at this point. Any Democratic senator who votes to confirm Jefferson Beauregard Sessions as Attorney General should immediately be rendered dead to the party and to every Democratic voter in the country. The context of the immediate moment makes this imperative.

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If it isn't clear by now, there's a powerful new campaign of voter suppression coming down the road. It doesn't matter whether the sudden amplification of the "voter fraud" meme is due to the fact that the president* is delusional on the subject, or due to the fact that he needed a diversion from the stories about Russian ratfcking that were beginning to pile up on the South Lawn, or simply due to the fact that Republicans suppress votes because they're Republicans.

It could be for one of those reasons. It could be for all three of them. The motive isn't the point. The point is that we soon likely will be in the middle of the greatest political brawl over the franchise since 1965.

It doesn't matter if the next nominee is worse. Beat that person, too. It doesn't matter how tough this may make your next re-election campaign; you didn't get elected to get re-elected. The issue of voting rights is too important to the country—and, god knows, to the party—for it to yield to any other consideration. It is an existential issue, for the republic and for the Democrats. There is no room for compromise or horse-trading. The Democratic Party should stand for the expansion of the franchise and for a greater ease in exercising it. Neither of these goals has a chance with Jefferson Beauregard Sessions running the Department of Justice.

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In the 1960s, the Democrats abandoned their Southern core leadership and threw its support behind the Civil Rights movement and the Voting Rights Act. This sea change fundamentally transformed American politics and, no matter what you may hear from conservatives trying to change the subject, it reversed forever the position of the two parties on the place of African-American citizens in the republic, an arrangement that had persisted, in fits and starts, since the election of Abraham Lincoln. From this rearrangement came the Southern Strategy and the modern conservative movement.

Any Democrat who votes for Sessions is voting against this history and is voting in such a way as to make all the political sacrifice therein a waste of time. Therefore, resistance to the Sessions nomination is a bright line in the sand beyond which should be found nothing but exile. Period, as prominent hostage Sean Spicer would say.

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